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Here's what Song of Ice and Fire actually wants to be, and why George can't finish it.
The Song of Ice and Fire isn't actually supposed to be dark, Machiavellian, hopeless, or a subversion of Tolkien at all.
It's just supposed to start that way.
The details may be complex, but the formula is simple. Low-fantasy version of the British Isles, torn apart by multi-sided Machiavellian power struggle, loosely based on the War of the Roses.
Things are bad because of Machiavellian power struggle.
In the background, subtle hints of external, magical, otherworldly threat. Warring factions scoff and ignore it as first. Enter the high-fantasy tropes; prophesied hero emerges to unite the morally-grey factions into an unambiguously-good pro-civilization force to confront and defeat the unambiguously-evil threat to all life.
Full transition, in the end, to epic Tolkienesque high fantasy, played straight rather than subverted.
Heroism triumphant, humanity triumphant, realm unified in peace and prosperity.
Roll credits.
Were the story to be completed thus, completed as it wants to be completed, as it yearns to be completed, every dark, gritty, Machiavellian moment would be fully justified.
Every chapter and scene filled with thugs and villains and no heroes at all would be fully justified.
Because they would merely serve to emphasize the rarity of heroes, and the need for them.
Because they would make the arrival of a true hero that much more satisfying when, late but not too late, he arrived.
ASOIAF doesn't really want to be a subversion of Tolkien at all. It wants to be a path out of darkness and into light. It wants to be a study in how Tolkien is deeply relevant, even to a gritty, morally grey world.
This is what George knows it needs to be.
But George cannot write it.
Why?
Because he's a socialist. And a boomer.
Socialism's motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is "thou shalt not be better than me".
The boomer's single guiding principle is "whatever makes me feel pleasure right now is good, and whatever makes me feel bad right now is evil".
Take these together, and you get someone who has a real problem with heroes. Heroes are, by definition, the best of us, at least on some dimension, and if your underlying motivation is envy, standing next to one is gonna make you feel bad.
This means that socialists, boomers, and socialist boomers tend not to want to believe in heroes and heroism.
They want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil because reasons.
So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist.
(Of course, when they see a fascist, they also call him a fascist, but that's just coincidence, because they'll call anything fascist... random passers-by, buildings, rocks, trees, squirrels, anything.)
Because they want to feel morally superior to him.
The only way they can admit that someone has a moral compass at all is if they can feel superior to him in some other way, usually by portraying them as naive, and hence doomed to failure because he is not empowered by cynicism and selfishness, to pursue the most efficient path to... whatever.
So if ol'George thinks that everyone who appears good is either secretly evil, or openly stupid, then writing a character with heroic impulses is gonna be tough, and writing about how they succeed... impossible.
This is why George can write characters with noble motives (Jon Snow, Eddard Stark, etc), but he keeps making them fail.
You see, in George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just lack of moral virtue.
If heroes are all frauds or suckers, then George is being smart, because he has seen through the whole heroism thing.
If heroes are real, and they do sometimes succeed, and they do make the world better for everyone, then George is just a fat, lazy, cynical old man who doesn't wanna finish his art for the sake of art or integrity, because he only ever wanted money, and now he has more than he knows what to do with.
In order to finish the story, George would need to have an awakening of virtue.
He would first have to develop a sense of integrity — a desire to fulfill his promises, even when no one can or will punish him for not doing so.
He would then have to develop a sense of humility — because to write a better person than he is, he would have to admit to himself that there is such a thing, that people can be better, and that trying to be better is an actual worthy goal, not just the act of falling for a con game run to control you.
The longer someone goes without admitting to their faults, the harder those faults are to admit to, because they have been more deeply invested in.
And this means he would also have to develop the courage to admit to himself that he is, in fact, a fat lazy cynical old coward, and that Tolkien, whom he envies and despises, was the far better man all along.
Harry Robinson@HarryLotusEater
From GRRM’s latest blog post: ‘I still haven’t written Winds of Winter… uhhh… because of fascism.’
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